Number of the Month

October 2003

Some lie and some die

Though not always successfully, Number Watch
attempts to maintain a certain level of dignity; a lofty, detached irony in face
of the tomfooleries of this modern world. Every now and then, however, along
comes a report so crass, so inane and so inherently absurd that moderate
language seems hardly adequate. When the international network of number
watchers began to buzz on the first day of October, it was a sign that an event
of an unusual level of fatuity had occurred.

Virtually every media outlet had the story. Global
warming said to kill 160,000 a year typicallyyelled the headline at CNN
from a Reuters dispatch:

MOSCOW (Reuters) --About 160,000 people die every year from
side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition and the
numbers could almost double by 2020, a group of scientists said.

The study, by scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) and
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said children in developing
nations seemed most vulnerable….

Seasoned number watchers need read no further before
recognising that such a number represents complete nonsense. Even if the global
warming myth were true, it would be lost in the noise. It is little more than a
month’s worth of deaths from Malaria alone.

The tenacity with which these people cling onto their myths
is staggering. They insist, for example, against all the evidence, that malaria
is a tropical disease. Here, for the third time, we repeat a paragraph from Sorry,
wrong number!:

Britain
once had 60,000 cases, when the climate was little different from now. Indeed,
in the early 1920s 16.5 million people suffered from malaria in regions reaching
the Arctic Circle. 100,000 men died of Malaria during the building of St
Petersburg. It became known as the city built on bones.

Why are people dying in their millions? One reason is that
they have been condemned to death by the eco-theologians who have imposed
a ban on DDT. The sainted Rachel Carson has decreed more deaths than
Hitler and Stalin combined. Furthermore, as that demonised apostate Bjorn
Lomborg pointed out, the money being wasted on religious icons such as the
Kyoto treaty could have been turned to giving clean water to everyone in the
world.

We expect, of course, nothing better from the WHO, which
has simply become an international front for PC pressure groups, but the decline
of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is sad, especially for those
of us who have the University of London as our alma mater. It is not the
first time, either. This school was involved in identifying the cluster
of four at Queniborough over two years ago.

Publication by press release is a classical symptom of junk
science. It would be interesting to see such claims tested by peer review.

Note: the heading is the title of a
Ruth Rendell novel.

Our rush out and buy
section

Now you can buy a
watch that protects you from the dreaded electromagnetic radiation. Make
sure you don't miss the video on this site.

After
visiting various websites looking for information on electromagnetic fields,
I’m beginning to believe electromagnetic fields might have a detrimental
effect on intelligence. This might be a worthy subject for an epidemiological
study by the MUNW School of Public Health.

The research grant application is already in the post.

Footnote: So where do numbers come
into it? The penetration
depth of a plane magnetic wave into a metallic screen varies inversely as
the square root of frequency. To halve the amplitude of a medium wave
radio signal (1 MHz), you would need about 0.1 mm thickness of shielding. To get
the same effect at 50 Hz you would need over 1 cm of shielding. At 10 Hz you
would need about 3cm.

Metallic underpants of this thickness are
not widely accepted as a fashion item.

Who’d have thought it?

The only people who would be hurt by abandoning the Kyoto
Protocol would be several thousand people who make a living attending
conferences on global warming.

Prof. Kirill Kondratyev

How things change. Not long ago Russia was being held back
by its economy being prey to dogma and authoritarianism, while the “free”
world marched on to progress. Now, with much of the world in the grip of dogma
from the eco-theologians who want to return it to the Stone Age, it is Russia
that is standing up for science, truth and common sense.

A topic that seems to be increasingly relevant is the
apparent increase in gun
crime. The rise of gun toting gangs in Manchester, for
example, has provoked much discussion
(and, incidentally, a remarkable display of sub-literacy). The
American love affair with the gun is something difficult for outsiders to
understand. Nevertheless, whatever the justness of the cause, the tendency to
embroider the statistics is to be deplored.

Here is a correction received from Charles DeWitt:

In the November 2000 issue you mentioned "Jeffrey A. Volberg, in a

kind message, gently chides for the inclusion on page 192 of Sorry
of aclaim from CNN that 13 child deaths are caused
every day by firearms inthe USA. If this number is wrong
I would be more than happy to publish acorrect value, if
anyone can supply an attested statistic."

This number is misleading in a number of ways, see:

http://www.geocities.com/cfso_march/PolicyPaper1.html

..." In spite of their claims, the "13 kids a day" number is a
lie; HCI

includes 18 and 19-year-old adults in their
studies. The real story isrevealed by the National Center
for Health Statistics, which found thatless than .07% of
the total deaths from firearms misuse were accidentvictims
under age five. According to NCHS, total firearm-related deathsfor
children between 5 and 14 years of age was 546 in 1997, or 1.6% ofthe
total. In total, firearm-related accident deaths for children aged0
to 14 years is 181, according to 1995 figures."...

or see:

http://www.geocities.com/sendtoscott/guns.htm

..."Gunfire killed 4,223 American children under age 19 in 1997,"
writes

Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. Fewer than
700 of these victimswere under 17 years old. In the same
year, about 700 other kids wereslaughtered with knives,
blunt objects or bare hands, while more than2,000
children under 15 died in car crashes and nearly 1,000 drowned.

According to the FBI, 738 children under age 13 were murdered in the US

- just 133 using guns.In 1998, 110
children aged 1-14 died from gunshot wounds, but they donot
tell you that in 1998, 200 were suffocated on ingested objects, 570died
from burns, 850 drowned, and 2.600 died in auto wrecks.

Firearm accidents are at the lowest level since this country started

keeping
statistics in 1903.In 1996, even though there were around
80 million people owning guns,there were only 44
accidental gun deaths for children under age 10.About
twice as many children under 10 die from drowning in bath tubs.

According to John Lott and John Whitley of the University of Chicago, 17

states have passed child access-prevention laws. Not only do such
lawsfail to reduce accidental firearm death and suicide
among children, butthe researchers estimate that 15 of
those states had a combined total of3,800 more rapes,
21,000 more burglaries, and almost 50,000 morerobberies
than they would have had without such laws.

Only about 30 people are accidentally killed by private citizens who

mistakenly
believe the victim to be an intruder. By comparison, policeaccidentally
kill as many as 330 individuals annually. (source: JohnLott)

In 1997, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a total of

21 accidental handgun deaths for children through age 14. Even
the 15-19year olds only add another 34 handgun accidental
deaths in the entireUnited States. The National Center
for Health Statistics reports 32suicides by handguns for
children 0-14 in 1997. Throw in the 15-19 yearolds, and
you get 179 more. (source: John Lott)

In 1997, the last year for which data are available, only 142 children

under 15 years of age died in gun accidents, and the total number
ofgun-related deaths for this age group was 642. More
children die eachyear in accidents involving bikes, space
heaters or drownings. The often

repeated claim that 12 children per day die from gun violence includes

"children" up to 20 years of age, the great majority of
whom are youngadult males who die in gang-related
violence.Here are some random comparisons of accidental
deaths for all "children"under the age of 20:

For every American child 4 years or younger murdered using a gun, more

than eight others die violently by other means - blunt objects,strangulation, or, most commonly, hands, fists, or feet. Even in
the 5to 14 age range, the American non-gun murder rate is
still more thantwice as high as the international
comparison group. Even if all gunhomicides were taken out
of the equation, America would still have aninfant-homicide
rate more than 3.5 times as high as other Westerncountries
(source: Christian Science Monitor).

Child murder is not a dispersed problem - it is tightly clustered

geographically.
Eighty five percent of US counties reported no juvenilehomicides
in 1997, and only 7 percent experienced two or more. Theproblem
is confined mainly to the big cities of the East and Westcoasts,
and to the Southwest (source: Christian Science Monitor)".....

I do hope you will correct the misleading impression that your "13

"child" deaths a day" statistic creates as soon as
possible.

Of
human frights

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine...
Hamlet

One of the favourite targets of the scaremongers is popular
medications; and the more popular they are the harder they go for them. One of
the reasons that real science does not accept RRs of less
than three (or greater than 0.3) is the question of confounding factors. One
confounding factor they like to ignore in this area is embodied in the
assumption that it is the treatment and not the disease that is the cause. A prime
example occurred on the first day of this month when the antibiotic
treatment of babies was “linked” to asthma. The authors completely ignored
the fact that antibiotics must have been administered to treat a serious disease
(probably involving lung infection) and quite perversely picked on the
antibiotics.

A new
report says that 58% of women taking HRT had abandoned it on the strength of
a previous study. The scaremongers have been out to get HRTfor some time (see, for example, Dangerous
and destructive nonsense). The present scare was based on a study
that produced a value for RR of 1.7. A
nice addition to the latter report was this:

"But women should put it into perspective; one
unit of alcohol a day increases a woman's risk of breast cancer by
6%."

That is a RR of 1.06! As we reported in November
last year, that one emanated from the doyen of epidemiological scaremongers, Sir
Richard Doll.

HRT is given to relieve distressing symptoms; even if we
reluctantly allow the validity of the marginal statistics, why is it so readily
discounted that the cause of those symptoms is also the cause of breast cancer?

Incidentally, the page in The Times of October 10
that carried the report of women abandoning the therapy was another
by, you guessed it, Nigel (thousands to die) Hawkes. Here is the opening
paragraph:

A NEW cancer drug could halve
the risk of a recurrence of breast cancer in older women, according to an
international trial. So striking are the results that the trial has been
stopped early and its results published in the New England Journal of
Medicine.

Once again, in a repeat of the
Tamoxifen fiasco, a US drug trial has been halted prematurely because of a
so-called striking result (RR= 0.57). What on earth do these people mean by the
term double blind trial? The research, supported by the drug
manufacturers, will not now be able to reveal any potential adverse effects as
it has been cut off in its prime.

Vale of tears

Number
Watch comes to you from the Blackmore Vale in Wiltshire. The picture is the
view from the bedroom of your bending author on a misty autumn morning. Make the
best of it, because the view is about to disappear behind a new housing estate.
It was going to be quite an appropriate development built around a traditional
village green, devised by the architects for the Duchy of Cornwall (i.e. Prince
Charles), but by the time Old Two Jags’ planners had got at it, it had turned
into a modern human battery farm. The nearby Dorset town of Gillingham is now
lost in a desert of such eyesores.

Now there is a new threat, those unlovely manifestations of
the post-scientific age, wind turbines. Of course the Vale is not unique in
this. Much of the most beautiful scenery in the British Isles is under threat
from these white elephants, as a new web site Wind-Farm.org
dramatically demonstrates. The locals have also created their own site savethevale.

Unfortunately, the public is so saturated with propaganda
from the eco-theologians, that most of them think these excrescences are A Good
Thing. Not only are they a manifestation of the Solar
Fraud, they actually have a disruptive effect on the energy market, making power
cuts all the more likely. They only exist because of massive subsidies out
of the taxpayers pockets and fines on electricity generators who fail to conform
to the requirements of the religion of those who are content to destroy the
environment in the name of the environment.

We have the misfortune to live in the new Dark Ages, where
science and beauty alike are buried in a morass of myth and superstition.

Two fatuous scares dominated the British media in
mid-October and they typified the manic inconsequentiality of the genre. One was
generated by a European report on “carcinogenic” baby food, while the other
arose from the publication of the results of GM field trials.

The
baby food saga arose (where else?) from the European Food Safety Authority.
They found between one and twenty-five parts per billion of a chemical
semicarbazide in jars of baby food. Why did this happen? It happened because
instrumentation has become available to measure absurdly small dilutions of
materials. We have seen it all before. Remember Salmon
Woman? All the vacuous ingredients of the health scare industry are there
– mice especially bred to be tumour-prone, forcing on them absurdly high doses
of chemicals (100 mg per kg of body weight), extrapolating the dubious results
to human beings, ignoring the first law of toxicology (the poison is in the
dose) and, above all, ignoring the fact that a billion is a bloody big number.

This one was so ineffably daft that it even found our old
friend Nigel (thousands to die) Hawkes on the side of the angels. Food scares
don’t worry me: people who start them do runs his headline. The article
itself is a fine and encouraging essay in utter reasonableness. Anyone who
has been reading Number Watch since January and December 2001 (remember death
by committee?) will recognise this sentiment:

The danger of trading in theoretical risks is
that it may send you stumbling into real ones. The Department of Health elected
to use disposable instruments for tonsillectomies to reduce the theoretical risk
of transmission of variant CJD, and produced a real risk: the clumsy disposable
instruments caused increased levels of bleeding, and two patients died.

One of the least attractive aspects
of these scaremongers is the way they batten onto the most vulnerable members of
society. New parents are nearly always in a state of perpetual anxiety about
doing the right thing for their offspring. It clouds their judgment and makes
them blind to arrant nonsense.

The other big manufactured scare
was, of course, the reports of the GM trials. Basically they demonstrated that
GM crops were successful in inhibiting weeds with a reduced use of herbicide.A natural, inevitable and foreseen consequence is that populations of
wildlife associated with those weeds will be reduced among those crops, but not
elsewhere, and the area under cultivation with such crops is small in proportion
to the whole. Shrill headlines have been anticipating the reports with cries of
“contamination”. This based on the fact that a certain amount of
cross-pollination goes on. So what? Some plants have a built in resistance to
chemicals that are not found in nature. Since it gives them no evolutionary
advantage, the trait will die out.

Anyway, one of the chemicals tested
in the trials was atrazine, which Mad Margot has already banned; not for any
particular reason, but reason and MM parted company long ago. The admirable
Philip Stott gives a reasoned account of it all and an assessment of the varying
levels of hysteria in the media in his EnviroSpin
Weblog, so it is not necessary for further comment here; except, perhaps, to
note an interesting outbreak of schizophrenia in the Telegraph, where the news
headlineField trials show GM crop farming could be ‘disastrous’ for
wildlife contrasted with the refreshingly reasonable treatment in the editorialFrankenstein knows best.

The day before we learned that Monsanto
pulls out of Europe. Quite wise too! America and Asia should just let
Europe sink into its own Green mire. What with Mad Margot and the European
Central Bank, the continent is heading for decades of the sort of economic decay
to which only the Greens aspire. Before Americans gets too complacent, however,
they should remember that they were only a few hanging chads away from a similar
fate.

Law and truth

'If the law supposes that,'
said Mr. Bumble...'The law is a ass - a idiot.'
Oliver Twist

Correspondence from Howard Whent

Subject: April 2003 newsletter & EPA reference

In doing research on the whole ETS issue, in particular on the 1998 Osteen
decision, I came across the Number Watch website.

The April 2003 Newsletter contains a reference to the US EPA report which
identified ETS as a Class A Carcinigen and Judge Osteen's 1998 decision to
'remove' this reference from the EPA report.

What the article did not report, is that on Dec. 11, 2002, the US
Court of Appeal, 4th circuit, vacated the 1998 decision, validating the EPA
report on ETS. The American tobacco company Philip Morris did not
exercise the option to appeal to appeal to the US Supreme Court and I can find
no evidence that any others did.

Philip Morris has now completely changed its website, and now makes a
very different statement in terms of ETS.

In the interest of academic accuracy.

Reply

The
EPA report is not valid. It is based on one of the most outrageous and
multiple frauds in the history of applied statistics. The EPA undertook the
so-called meta-study four years after it had begun formulating its anti-smoking
legislation. It left out a major study that produced an adverse result. It
changed the criterion for significanceduring
the course of the study (an unforgivable scientific crime) to an
unprecedented low of 90% (P<0.1). It ignored all confounding
factors. After all that it achieved a paltry relative risk
of 1.19, when real science usually insists on at least 3.0 and NEVER less than
2.0.

The US
Court of appeal can vote to rescind the second law of thermodynamics if it
wishes, but that will not make it any less valid. Osteen remains a hero in the
defence of truth amid the fetid corruption of the American legal system. The
pusillanimous Philip Morris (themselves no strangers to untruth) presumably made
their decision not to appeal on the basis of their chances of success in a legal
system where political correctness takes precedence over scientific truth.

Further
footnote, from Pete Petrakis:

Howard Whent needs to read the ruling of the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals
on the EPA second-hand smoke meta-analysis. He states:

"... on Dec. 11, 2002, the US Court of Appeal,
4th circuit, vacated the 1998 decision, validating the EPA report on ETS."

The appeals court did NOT overturn Judge Osteen's findings that EPA had used
deceptive science to support a policy on environmental tobacco smoke that it had
adopted before it even began its study. It did not even address those issues.
Instead the appeals court ruling focused only on whether the lower federal court
had jurisdiction to review EPA actions in this matter and found that it did not.
If Mr. Whent is interested in "academic accuracy," he can find the
full text of the circuit court's ruling here:http://www.tobacco.neu.edu/Extra/hotdocs/flu-cured_CCA4_reversal.htm
It contains no mention at all of Judge Osteen's findings on the EPA's fraudulent
science, so it's flatly wrong to say that the Agency's findings have been
"validated." Judge Osteen's findings in this area were not challenged
by the appeals court and remain intact (though unenforceable).
Mr. Whent also says:"Philip Morris has now completely changed its
website, and now makes a very different statement in terms of ETS."
He should know that Philip Morris and other tobacco companies are required,
under terms of the extortionate lawyer-enriching $240 billion settlement with
state attorneys general, to post anti-smoking statements at their websites as
well as fund anti-smoking advertising campaigns.

Trendy!

'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot
is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's
a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the
perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory!
'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil,
run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN
EX-PARROT!!
Monty Python

Long-time number watcher John Baltutis wrote “You’ll
love this
one”. Well, perhaps love is not quite the word, but as an example of
completely meaningless epidemiology it certainly takes the biscuit.

First, let’s look at what they did:

Methods We examined the relationship between total andsoluble
dietary fiber intake and the risk of CHD and cardiovasculardisease (CVD)
in 9776 adults who participated in the NationalHealth and Nutrition
Examination Survey I Epidemiologic Follow-upStudy and were free of
CVD at baseline. A 24-hour dietary recallwas conducted at the
baseline examination, and nutrient intakeswere calculated using Food
Processor software. Incidence andmortality data for CHD and CVD were
obtained from medical recordsand death certificates during
follow-up.

Can this really mean what it appears to say? They took
anecdotal evidence of diet on just one day and used that as a basis for a
19 year follow up? But the best is yet to come:

Results During an average of 19 years of follow-up, 1843incident
cases of CHD and 3762 incident cases of CVD were documented.Compared
with the lowest quartile of dietary fiber intake (median,5.9 g/d),
participants in the highest quartile (median, 20.7g/d) had an
adjusted relative risk of 0.88 (95% confidence interval[CI], 0.74-1.04;
P = .05 for trend) for CHD events and of 0.89(95% CI, 0.80-0.99;
P = .01 for trend) for CVD events. The relativerisks for
those in the highest (median, 5.9 g/d) compared withthose in the
lowest (median, 0.9 g/d) quartile of water-solubledietary fiber
intake were 0.85 (95% CI, 0.74-0.98; P
= .004for trend) for CHD events and 0.90 (95% CI, 0.82-0.99;
P = .01for trend) for CVD events.

What on earth is “p = 0.004 for trend” supposed
to mean? Does it apply to all four points or just two? Either way almost any
four random numbers will reveal an apparent significant
trend. How do they calculate it? Quoting p for trend seems to be the
new trend among junk epidemiologists. As the magic word “Tulane” would
suggest, this is one for the annals ofinanity.

Nanny knows best

In many ways it is a pity that The Times has hoist a
tariff barrier, in the name of profit, against foreigners who might learn
something from what was once the newspaper of record about the state of what was
once a great nation. Two recent pieces in particular punctuate the decline of a
once proud and independent people into a marshmallow clump of whingeing wimps.
They show the two sides of the divide about that succubus known as the Nanny
State, which is slowly but surely emasculating the island race.

The latest is a piece of resistance by one Rod
Liddle, entitled Let them eat lard. It is summarised by the
sub-heading The Government wants you to eat less, smoke less, drink less. Ron
Liddle couldn’t care less.

.........

I’ve been trying to work out what sort of
person the Government wants us all to be. I’ve attempted to discern a pattern
in their increasingly frequent pronouncements about our personal predilections
and penchants. In the past five or six years they have told us off for:

Now I can claim a happy adherence to at least
eight of the above Government-designated criminal activities. No, I’m not
telling you which ones (and believe me, I’m working on the other two). So I
suppose I’m quite a long way down the road to being the very antithesis of all
that they want us to be. Looking at the list, it seems to me that they would
wish upon us a fairly ascetic and determinedly middle-brow existence; the
staples of lumpenprole culture — smoking, bad food, idleness — are
disavowed, as are the top-end affections for modern art, drugs, promiscuity and Brass
Eye.

They want us to jog and eat salads prior to
reading a good — although not too good — book, maybe something by
Sebastian Faulks or Ruth Rendell — and all the while bedecked in the scarlet
sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and sipping mineral water. It has the whiff
of the church youth club about it, does it not? Although any mention of God is,
as ever, most definitely absent — they don’t do God. They wish us instead to
live in a sanitised, secular hell. The Prime Minister himself seems to be the
living embodiment of clean, healthy, family living. He plays tennis. He
doesn’t get pissed or smoke crack. He doesn’t, so far as we are aware, shag
around, although one has to say that there is a somewhat unprepossessing pool of
potential shagees surrounding him from whom to choose an illicit partner. He
eats fish and chips only when he’s about to be photographed by a snapper from
a newspaper in the North of England. And, of course, he has occasional chats
with Sir Cliff Richard. All of this is very healthy indeed — so it was a
surprise to find him in hospital with heart trouble last week.......

And so it goes on. At this stage he is beginning to lose
some of us. While it has ceased to be a simple pleasure to indulge in tobacco
and alcohol and has now become a positive duty, having to eat Big Macs, listen
to crap music and watch banal TV programmes by someone we have never heard
of seem to be demands beyond the call of duty. Nevertheless, despite a proper
antipathy to the pseuds who populate modern art, it is difficult not to
sympathise with the sentiments in his final paragraph:

I’m getting a little bored of being told how to
live my life. Every time Kim Howells, or Beverley Hughes or any of those
anonymous health ministers tells me that something is bad, I make a mental note
to transgress at the earliest possible opportunity. This has made for a more
interesting life: if it wasn’t for Kim, for example, I wouldn’t have spent
half as much time at Tate Modern as I have just lately. Because there is a
rather nasty, smug narcissism inherent in these ministerial strictures and, of
course, the connotation that they know better than we do. The only possible
response is to disobey, often.

But what of the other side of this coin? The awful
Orwellian nature of the Nanny State is summed up in the person of a typical
unelected commissar, one Professor Dr John Ashton. That, by the way, is a new
development, using a Germanic multiplicity of titles. Your bending author may
now be referred to as Professor Dr, though you might prefer the title used in
certain American left wing
circles of Pompous Ass.

In defence of the “nanny state”, Professor Dr
John Ashton, regional director of public health in the North West, said
yesterday that government intervention was needed to protect those incapable of
protecting themselves. “Individuals cannot protect themselves from
bioterrorism, epidemics of Sars, the concerted efforts of the junk food
industry, drug dealers and promoters of tobacco and alcohol,” he said.

“A civilised society will provide a legislative
framework to protect people, and in particular the most vulnerable. Criticism of
the nanny state is almost always misplaced and is frequently
nonsensical.”

These authoritarian Marxists, such as Mad Margot, having
been rejected by the democratic process around the world, have simply insinuated
themselves into positions of power by undemocratic means. Everything you need to
know about Ashton is summarised in the final paragraph:

He
has three grown-up sons, but recently became a father again with his partner
Maggi Morris, 47, a director of public health in Preston. Their baby has been
named Fabian Che Jed, after the Fabian Society, Che Guevara and the Old
Testament prophet Jedediah.

For anyone who asks what this had to do with numbers –
welcome, you must be new.

The
man who mistook his bathtub for a hockey stick

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away –
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see
Hunting of the Snark.
Lewis Carroll

Well, well! The pontiff of eco-theology, who has been
choreographing the assault on infidels who doubt the true religion of global
warming, has himself come under examination. He has been weighed in the balance
and found wanting. A new paper
by McIntyre and McKitrick of Ontario has probed into the inner recesses of the
data that gave rise to the notorious hockey stick. What they found, in a
masterly essay in academic understatement, is a considerable can of worms. Amid
all the omissions, substitutions and amendments, however, there is one act of
subreption that is so stark that it has all the appearances of downright fraud.
Mann et al simply censored the data at the beginning of the series, which
belong to the mediaeval warm period. Reintroducing them gives the lie to the
claim, so forcefully prosecuted by the IPCC, that the past decade was the
warmest in history.

Pardon the repetition, but this is what Number Watch
said only last month:

The self satisfied arrogance of the likes of
Michael Mann, who appears to be orchestrating the campaign, is really quite
breathtaking. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! This international
coterie, if not by fraud certainly by subreption, have foisted a spurious
theory on an unsuspecting world, accuse anyone who begs to differ of being
unscientific.

The curve is not a hockey stick at all. It is what is known
in the field of reliability studies as the bathtub curve – flat in the middle
and curving up at both ends.

The Hockey Stick is dead. Long live science!

First of the plagues of
Europe

Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto
Pharaoh, and tell him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people
go, that they may serve me.
For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still,
Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon
the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the
sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain.
Exodus

Back in May, in the discussion of the Number of the Month,
we asked “How long will it be before various pests get completely out of
control?” As night follows day, it was inevitable that the wilful and
arbitrary banning of chemicals by the unelected commissar for the environment,
whom we have dubbed Mad Margot, would result in plague and pestilence. The only
question was – where would it strike first? Well, appropriately enough for the
time of year it was turkeys.

The Times of October 28th reported:

TURKEY farmers are barricading their premises to prevent
the spread of a savage disease after Brussels banned the only drug that can
eradicate it. Ten million turkeys being reared for the £100 million Christmas
trade are at risk from blackhead (Histomanos meleagridis), which can
destroy entire flocks.

The disease, which enters the gut of birds and
attacks their liver, has broken out in France, Germany and the Netherlands and
farmers fear that it will be carried into Britain by migrating birds. East
Anglia and Kent are particularly vulnerable. …..

……The panic has been made worse because
farmers and vets no longer have any drugs available to treat the disease. For
decades a drug called Emtryl has been added to poultry feed to prevent blackhead
but in May this year, the European Commission banned it because of a potential
link to cancer in human beings.

Scientists could not agree a safe maximum limit
for residues of the drug in birds destined for eating.

So, for the sake of a
“potential” link, i.e. epidemiological nonsense, we have a real disaster.
There is more to come.

Number of the month 75

This is the number of new jobs being created in the UK
public sector every day. A purely parochial matter, non-British readers
might think, but take it as a terrible warning of what happens when a democratic
country gets into the grip of a finance minister red in tooth and claw.

The total numbers employed in public administration,
education and health have risen by 750,000 in five years. This matches the
decline in manufacturing jobs of 700,000 in the same period.

There can be only one outcome of a policy of continual
transfer of people from the wealth-creating to the wealth-absorbing sectors of
the economy. It is the outcome that the leaders of the main European countries
are only just beginning to face up to.

Then there is the obverse of this coin, taxation. Britain
had enjoyed a period of low taxation and enviable economic progress, but in the
present Chancer’s reign taxes have gone up a staggering 50%. In the year
2000-2001 alone, The Treasury
added 13,000 staff to the 67,000 employed by the Inland Revenue. Means tested
schemes of such overweening complexity that they repel the intended
beneficiaries are responsible for much of this growth and they have all
descended into administrative chaos.

It would not be so bad, of course, if the new jobs were
conducive to national wealth, but they are not. It is not merely the existence
of the new silly politically correct jobs, such as those quoted in September
last year, or even just the sheer numbers. It is the scale of remuneration and
benefits. Bradford council, for example, offer their Chief Executive a higher
salary than the Prime Minister’s. These jobs come with inflation-proofed
pensions superior to the sort that have been wrested from those in the private
sector. No one would object to more doctors, nurses, policemen etc. but what
they are getting is more managers, form-fillers and target-fiddlers.

As coins only have two sides, we will have to devote the
rim to the question of public borrowing, the growth of which has been grossly
underestimated in the optimistic forecasts. The Chancer has led his nation to
the brink of an abyss. It has all been too predictable (just try searching Number
Watch for the word “Chancer”). Even as recently as the budget speech in April,
Brown’s Quixotic optimism led Number Watch to cry “Heaven preserve
the world from optimistic finance ministers.” The great irony of it all is
that the man might yet be rescued from his folly by the success of the
tax-cutting regime in the USA – US economy sizzles as 7.2% growth hits a
20-year high was headline in the month’s final The Times Business
Section. Only a dramatic world economic recovery led by an American
resurgence can save Britain from the consequences of the extravagance of this
inveterate gambler.